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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Remember that while Israel is a first world country, it's tiny. It's population is 8.4 million, 1/40th of the U.S. and about the size of New York City proper (not suburban, which is ~20 million). Probably the Israeli government does not have the same level of talent and other resources that the U.S. government does. Imagine if the NSA was staffed only with residents of NYC, for example.

(However, 3 of 8 US Supreme Court Justices are from NYC, and Alito and Scalia are/were from NJ.)

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This is a bit offset by their large proportional tech sector and compulsory service. The NSA (and gov tech in general) would be a hell of a lot better if everyone had to do a year or two of government service.

Clarification: not to imply that the NSA is bad at their job currently, but if they could borrow two years off of every technical person in the country I can't see how that could hurt.

Yes and no...

Yes, because there would be a bigger pool to choose from. For the same reason that bigger schools have better sports teams: More Athletic types... Having a bigger pool of candidates means you have more chance to get specific with your choices.

No, because then you would be using the "Draft". There is a reason the US moved away from it in after Vietnam and went to an "All Volunteer" force. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta... )

Personally, I think those types of services (Military, FBI, etc) should be volunteer... last thing you want is your back being guarded or secrets been covered by someone who doesn't agree with or want to be there.

Definitely agree on the logic around a negative impact of a draft based service. I was thinking more along the lines of the Swiss model where you can go be a teacher or a ski patrolman and it'll still count rather than a Korea/Vietnam style thing.

That's a common (and reasonable) argument, but the counter is that then such organizations will be staffed with "true believers" who question neither specific orders nor (especially) overall policies. Draftees are more likely to blow the whistle.

>Imagine if the NSA was staffed only with residents of NYC

Bad analogy. Israel aggressively imports tech/engineering/science talent from the global Jewish diaspora.

I think it might actually be a pretty good analogy. Doesn't NYC (along with SV and maybe a few other parts of the country) do the same?

The NSA staffed only with residents of NYC would probably look very different from the NSA staffed only by residents of the state of Michigan.

I think NSA is mostly staffed with residents of Maryland. Technically.

In the sense that most people move there as part of being hired, yes. The though experiment is to consider the result of restricting recruiting for NSA staff to only NYC/Michigan.

Well the density of talented highly smart and technical people in Israel is actually quite high.

I'd bet their tech-sector-knowledge population is higher than Manhattan, by ratio.

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